Hi everyone! First off thanks to everybody who wished me a Happy Birthday, my birthday is today (Monday) and last year on my birthday I made a very special mystery gift and so this year I want to make another one. This year I will choose and it is my wish that the mystery gift be Jirachi!

Newgrounds and Hacked Arcade Version
I recently released the Newgrounds (same as the one here, go and rate the game por favor) and the Hacked Arcade versions of PTD2. The hacked arcade version will give you more experience per kill and it is easier to capture pokemon but it tags your pokemon with the hacked tag. Enjoy!Soft Cap Increase
Many of you have been asking for the soft cap to increase, so I will work on that this week. You might ask yourself what the soft cap is since you can level up to 100 already. Well the soft cap is the level in which your pokemon stop learning moves. The soft cap is currently 12 so my plan is to increase it to at least 14 if not higher.

Breeding
Another highly anticipated feature is the breeding mechanic and I think this will be a good week to introduce it. Okay so here are a couple of details on how it will work:

Most of the rules regarding egg groups, gender, and families from the actual games will be in play here.

Breeding and Egg Hatching will take place in the Pokemon Center.

To hatch the egg you will have to visit it for a number of days. It will usually take less than 7 days of visits for it to hatch depending on the rarity of the pokemon in the egg.

The parents stay with the egg until the egg is hatched. They are very caring!

Egg moves will be implemented, same rules as the real game.

You can have a shadow or shiny egg hatch

You will find out if it's shiny or shadow the moment it's hatched, the egg will look the same.

Each parent can increase the chance of the egg being shiny or shadow by a percent.

Special held items will be sold that can also increase the chance of the egg being shiny or shadow. You will be able to buy them with SnD Coins or Daily Coins.

So let's say each parent can increase it by 4% and the item can increase it by 4% then if both parents are shiny and they are both carrying the item then that will increase the chance for it to be shiny by 16%

You will only be able to have 3 eggs hatching per account but you can increase this number with SnD Coins or Daily Coins.

Everstone and Neeverstone
Speaking of items I will be adding the Everstone and the Neeverstone (never everstone), the everstone will stop evolutions from happening and the neeverstone will stop any experience from being gained. Both of these items can be bought with SnD Coins or Daily Coins.

Daily Activity Tweaks
I won't be adding a new daily activity but I have a changed planned that will make this one more doable. Right now every day you have to find 10 new people to trade with that you had not traded with before. The Tweak will reset the people you traded with each day, essentially you can trade with the same people once a day. I will be adding a different one at some point but for now we are sticking to this one.

Creature Universe - Toxic Starter!
This is the Toxic Type starter, he starts off pure toxic but ends up Toxic/Ground by the third evolution. Here is the concept drawing from one of our artist Bill along with some non-final names that he came up with.

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! Last week we successfully got some work done that had been backed up for a bit. Got the Daily Activity out, Researcher, Pokedex, Saving your storage's position. There are still some left to add but I can safely say that we can move forward with the next story level.

Mystery Gift
Last week we all decided we wanted Electric type as the Mystery Gift, but this week in honor of the flightless Turkey we will have a flying bird Mystery Gift. I picked some from different generations, vote on the one you want! Like Shinx, this one will be shiny and restricted to one use.PTD Fan Film 4!
Joel posted the 4th video in the ptd fan film, check it out here. This episode is about a Joey encountering Team Rocket for the first time before you meet him. If you like PTD 1 then I recommend you check it out!

Funding Postponed + Details
We were planning to start our funding this week but Dan and I haven't been able to figure out all the prizes yet. Dan has been super busy doing a lot of business work for SnD Games so I can focus on game development. While he is not doing that he is answering order emails for Snd Coins and making 3d models for the creatures in CUTD. Thanks Dan! Anyways, the funding will be to help us keep developing PTD2 and CUTD. Coin sales and Advertisement help immensely but the future is a little shaky. We want to raise $50k and that will cover about half a year of expenses for artist, programming, design, any server cost. The cool thing is that if you help to fund you will get really cool and exclusive prizes! We will even have cool goals for reaching a certain amount and if we make it to the goal of 50k we will also have what are called stretch goals. Extra prizes that you guys can win if we reach even higher amounts for things like being able to hire an artist to be full time, being able
to bring Dan in full time, increasing the amount of levels in CUTD and
bringing things like multiplayer to those games. The funding will be very much like a Kickstarter but the reason we aren't doing a kickstarter is because we aren't trying to fund a particular project we are trying to fund the company itself. Right now I'm full time but it might be that if we can't complete this funding I might have to get a job programming for a different company and that will cut my game development time drastically. So we really appreciate you guys helping us out and in turn getting rewarded for it! Note: The funding has not started yet so there is currently no way to help us yet.

First Gym Level!
This next update will feature the first gym on PTD2. I really want to make these encounters stand out and for the enemy to have fun and new mechanics. So I hope you guys can look forward to that!

Creature Universe TD
Not going to talk a lot about CUTD this week. Just know that progress is being made and that I will talk more about it next week!

Wii U Friends
I also got a Wii U if you want to add me to your friend list my id is: sam_sndgames

Weekly ProgressAlpha v1.26: Released!

Gym Battle Story Level Added

Intro Added

Level Layout Added

Level Waves Added

Custom Attacks Added

Pidgey's Gust

Pidgeotto's Gust

Pidgeot's Gust

Ending Added

Mystery Gift

Graphic Added

Stats Added

New Abilities Added

Evolution Information Added

Attack Information Added

Added to Trading Center

Changed Graphics In-Game For Mystery Gift

Changed Server Code

Changed Blog Links

Made the Zapdos Level Easier

Fixed Shiny and Shadow Pokemon Walking in Story Mode

Fixed bug with the attack Uproar not waking up pokemon in battle

Added Ledian and Ariados to the Trading Center Search and Request Pages

That's all I have for this week, keep checking back daily to see how I'm doing with the progress! As always let me know what you think, your feedback is valued!

Hello everyone, pretty interesting week we had last week. By interesting I mean lacking in any updates. I must admit that I've had a rough last couple of weeks and the whole security update really took a lot out of me. After a few days of clearing my head and relaxing I'm ready to get back on the horse. In my days off I really had a chance to think about a couple of things.

Creature Universe TD - Back to the basics
Do people ever tell you something that triggers something else in your mind? This happens to me quite often. Many times your feedback and suggestions are triggers to other thoughts that help the game grow and evolve over time. In this case Joel, my brother, commented on PTD2 and how complex the game had gotten when compared to PTD1. PTD1 had the element of pick up and play just getting into the action. PTD2 appeals to me because I like to explore and walk around but this comes at a price of having a game that you sit down and play when you have more time. I felt that if I really want to bring CUTD to the mobile market and to save time in development that it would be best to remove the walking around part of the game and stick to a structure similar to PTD1. The focus will then be on making the levels, creatures, attacks, and abilities more interesting to play. Since we already have a Mystery Gift figured out this week the poll will be about which of the two different structures did you like best. PTD1 or PTD2?

Joel & Sam Make Comics
I mentioned Joel just a bit ago, he lives only about an hour away from my house so I see him three to four times a week. We talk a lot about projects, games, and movies. Every once in a while we talk about projects that we can work on together but with running Sam and Dan Games, plus school, plus life, my time is very short. With this project I help up with coming up with funny and interesting ideas for comics that cross over famous video games with famous movies. The first crossover is Hunger Games with Fruit Ninja, and Joel came up with Star Wars with Portal. Check them out and comment on the comic blog with what other crossovers you might want to see. http://joelsamcomic.blogspot.com/

More Limited and Valuable Mystery Gifts
Mystery Gifts are meant to reward players who are following along the development of our games. The first few Mystery Gifts have been regular versions of pokemon that won't show up for a while. These have value in that they won't be available for somebody that didn't get the Mystery Gift but they will be able to get them once the game reaches that stage pretty easily even thought it could be years before that happens. To further increase the value of Mystery Gift the next Mystery Gifts will be shiny version instead! The only major complaint that people have with Mystery Gifts is that since you can enter the code so much there is an over abundance of them. To counter this you will only be able to enter the code once for each account. You will get 3 pairs of male and female so if you wish to trade them later on you will have 2 extra pairs. After this the code will no longer work for your account and yes I know you can make more than one account and get more but I hope that the extra work involve will lower the amount that people get and thus reduce how many are out there and increase their rarity in the future.

Weekly Progress
For PTD2 I'm still working on the items from last week. During my break I remembered the things that I did wrong with PTD1 and the major one was rushing out content to get it out each week. I still like adding things to the game every week (I'm sure you guys wish there was new content every day!) but I want to make sure that what I make lives up to my expectations and a lot of time to get something out in by the deadline I have to cut things down. So what this means is we still get weekly updates but I will make sure that I get things up to the quality that I want to reach instead of rushing things to get them out on time.

Alpha v1.25: Released!

Mystery Gift

Graphics

Stats

New Attacks

Charge

Evolution Information

Add To Trading Center

Change In Game Mystery Gift Link

Change Server Code - To give out the correct mystery gift and limit users that have already used it.

Update Pokedex when you evolve a pokemon

Properly align some pokemon when they are following behind you

Better Map UI - Similar to the Battle UI, it shows time of day and your current money amount.

Pokedex

Implemented in-game

Save and Load Pokedex Data

Saving Pokemon's party and storage position

Add a confirmation popup to the back button on story mode

Check the Forgot Password pages for any errors

Sponsor Versions of the game

Daily Activities - The first activity is to trade with 10 different trainers in the PTD2 Trading Center.

Letting you buy adoption pokemon from ptd2 with Daily Coins

Creating Daily Activity page

Creating first daily activity

Pokemon Researcher

That's what we have for you this week, we are still working on all the funding prices and all of that so hopefully that will come out next week. We will really need you guys to chip in and help us continue making you great games. As always let me know what you think, I read all the comments posted on here, twitter and all emails. I don't have enough time to answer them all but I do read them.

Hello world! Welcome to another week of Sam and Dan game goodness. Originally we had planned for a big event for this week but we couldn't get all the details sorted out, so it will have to wait until next time. So what is the big event about? Well, basically we will be needing you guys to help us keep developing Ptd2 and Cutd. You can think of it like a kickstarter except it's not really about one project but about the whole company. We are working out some cool prizes for those of you who wish to help us out. Like I said before we won't be starting it this week but I wanted to give you guys the heads up of what is coming.

Security Measures
Many of you have noticed that there are a lot of hacked pokemon flying around in the trading center. This week I will spend a good amount of time beefing up the security among other things. So that one person that keeps spamming my twitter can finally relax for a chance.

Update on Security Measures:There is a lot of misinformation going
around (especially on YouTube videos) about what happened and how it
happened. So I'm here to tell you what happened, and how it happened
straight from the source.

First I patched up the game so certain
hacks would no longer work. Some hackers will complain about this but
really they can only blame themselves for this. If they were to hack for
their own personal collection and just stay quiet about it then I
wouldn't even notice and would leave them alone. But... they decided to
start putting up illegal trades and tried to scam other players. That is
not acceptable so I had to step in and add more security.

After I did this it was time to remove any
illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't catch in the game yet like Ho-oh
for example) from any account that had them. I had a list of all the
illegal pokemon and I had the id of who the original owner was (the
person who captured/created this pokemon) and who the current owner was
(the person who had the pokemon in their account). Usually for the
person who currently had the pokemon I simply removed the pokemon from
their account. If the person had multiple illegal pokemon even if he
didn't create them I would remove more valuables. You really should know
better than to hold multiple illegal pokemon, period.

People who created multiple illegal pokemon
also had valuables taken. Creating illegal pokemon is not acceptable
either. If you created so many illegals and you tried trading other
people for them trying to scam them your account was completely reset.

The next step was removing any pokemon that
had illegal shiny values. For example shadow totodile or shiny
vanillite. I followed the same rules as illegal. The more you had the
more you lost. Most people only owned 1 and all I did was remove it and
move along.

The last check was for shiny starters or shiny zorua that the original owner had not paid for.

Okay so that was the process, I went and
checked each account by hand. This wasn't an automatic thing where bam a
bunch of random accounts were deleted. If you lost a lot of things the
things you lost were hacked and I couldn't allow them to stay in the
system. If you buy a stolen good and the police finds out about it, they
won't put you in jail but they will take away the stolen merchandise.

As far as how many accounts were affected
by this less than 200 accounts were affected by this. This is out of
millions of accounts that exist. So less 1% of all account lost
something. Don't for a second think that thousands and thousands of
account were affected. Trust me I did this by hand and thousands would
have taken me weeks to do. Also like i mentioned before most people only
lost 1-2 pokemon and less than 20 actually got their account reset.

Well I hope that cleared some things up for
you guys. Thanks for understanding, it was actually pretty sad for me
when I have to delete pokemon like that... it definitely took a lot of
my motivation out from this week.

Getting it done
So I've been piling up a bunch of new features and things that I've been wanting to add and it is finally time to get them done. This week I will focus on the things that were left behind from last week without adding too much to it.Pokemon Researcher
While making the behaviors for the different wild pokemon I started to test them and I was having a lot of fun just watching what they did. So I thought that it would be pretty fun to have a mode that you could just spawn some pokemon and watch them interact with each other and with you. You can't capture them or battle. You just get to play around and see if anything fun happens. This mode is really easy to add since all the work for it is pretty much done. Just have to make some menus, which I hate >.<Mystery Gift
The poll this week will start with asking for what type you want to see this week and then it will move to a list of possible candidates. Let's figure this out together!

Weekly Progress

My Status: Working on blog!Alpha v1.25 Progress List:
Note: The list below is for v1.25 when it is released.

Security Stuff (100%)

Can no longer log into story mode with an illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't obtain yet) (100%)

Add a confirmation popup to the back button on story mode if you haven't saved (0%)

Release Pokemon (0%) - Note: You can already release them in the Pokemon Center if you don't want to wait for this to be done.

Pokemon Researcher (0%)

Add list in the FAQ page on where to find pokemon and at what time, similar to the PTD1 list (0%)

Fixed bug with the attack Uproar not waking up pokemon in battle (0%)

Add a graphic for removing a pokemon from the field (0%) - To better tell what is going on when fighting and NPC trainer.

Add new Level Item interface graphics for the ui (0%)

Added which pokemon you will be battling in the next battle in 1v1 mode (0%)

Make pressing Enter to trigger a lot of the menu buttons (0%) Pressing enter to log in instead of clicking on it.

Check the Forgot Password pages for any errors (0%)

Top Searchers/Top Request/Latest Trades (0%)

Creature Universe: Map Abilities
Ptd2 introduced the concept of the map. Creature Universe TD will take it even farther with map abilities. An example of this is very early in Pillar Island, the grass start zone, you will be given some bug bombs to throw at some bugs to clear them out. I made an awesome concept sketch to illustrate this example.

Bug Bomb takes out bugs, one of the map abilities you will get

So instead of only walking around you will be able to equip items to do different actions. Your creatures don't get left out on the action. Each family of creatures will have their own ability that they can use in the map for different effects. In this example the Grass Starter which is still unnamed has a tongue ability that lets him eat certain bugs. You will be able to switch place with your creature so that you can control it while your trainer avatar follows it. Here is another amazing concept sketch that I made to illustrate this example.

Grass starter using his map ability on a bug creature

In CUTD your character will perform more functions than the characters have ever had in ptd and ptd2. That's all I have for you this week, keep checking back to see how we are progressing. As always let me know what you think! Sam out.